“Lady Chelmsford, ten o’clock,” Tristan murmured, steering them left.
“She will ask about your gown. What she means is whether the rumours are true.”
“Which rumours? There appear to be several.”
“All of them. Smile as though you find her charming. I will handle the extraction.”
Lady Chelmsford arrived in a billow of lavender silk and exclamations, seizing Rosamund’s hands with the intimate aggression of a woman who had not spoken to her in four years and intended to make up for it in sixty seconds.
“My dear Duchess! What a vision—that colour is perfection. Now you simplymusttell me everything?—”
“Lady Chelmsford.” Tristan’s voice cut through the effusion with surgical precision. “How kind. You will forgive us—Lady Ashbourne has requested a word before the sets begin. I am sure my wife will find you later.”
He was already moving, drawing Rosamund forward with the seamless authority of a man redirecting a river. Lady Chelmsford’s mouth hung open on the word she never got to speak.
“Lady Ashbourne has not requested a word,” Rosamund said.
“Lady Ashbourne does not know we exist. She is occupied with Lord Fenwick’s appalling waistcoat and will remain so for some time.” He guided them toward a position near the tall windows. “I have found that invoking a hostess’s name is the most efficient method of ending a conversation no one wished to begin.”
She should resent it. The management. The presumption that she could not face Lady Chelmsford without a man to intervene.
She did not resent it. The realisation sat badly.
For the next half hour, Tristan held the perimeter of their evening with the discipline of a siege commander. When Lord Hartwell approached with a gleam of curiosity in his eyes, there having been, famously, no courtship at all—Tristan interceptedhim with a question about Hartwell’s stables that consumed the man so completely he forgot his original purpose. When Mrs Drummond-Cole materialised at Rosamund’s elbow and began a sentence that contained the wordsyour poor father, Tristan appeared from nowhere, placed his hand at the small of Rosamund’s back, and invented a Lord Pemberton who required the Duchess’s attention. Mrs Drummond-Cole retreated in confusion. Tristan’s hand remained at Rosamund’s back three seconds longer than necessary, and the warmth of it lingered through the silk like a brand.
He never raised his voice. Never made a scene. He simply stood beside her with the immovable certainty of a man who had decided what the evening would be, and adjusted every variable accordingly.
It should have felt like a cage. She knew what cages felt like.
This felt like a wall between her and every blade the room was sharpening, and the man who had built it was watching the doors as though the danger might come from any direction and he intended to be standing in its path when it arrived.
The orchestra began to tune for the first set. Tristan turned to her.
“Dance with me.”
Quiet. Not a command—she had heard his commands. This was a request made by a man who expected refusal and was asking anyway.
Rosamund’s body went rigid. The last time she had danced, she had been nineteen. Her father had still been alive. She had danced in white muslin at the Seftons’ spring ball and believed—with the unshakeable faith of a girl who had never been dropped—that the floor would always hold.
“You cannot truly expect this of me.”
“One dance. For appearances. For peace. After that, I will not ask again.”
“I have not danced in years.”
“The steps have not changed.”
“I have.”
She realised it immediately, without knowing how exactly she did. He understood, with a specificity that should not have been possible, exactly what she meant.
He extended his hand. Open. Steady.
Against every instinct she had cultivated in four years of learning to need no one and trust nothing, Rosamund placed her hand in his.
The music began.
She was terrible. Her body remembered the shapes of the steps the way one remembers the layout of a house long since burned. Her timing was half a beat behind. Her feet found the wrong position. Her shoulders carried the tension of a woman braced for impact rather than one surrendering to a waltz.
